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Barry Schwartz: Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition – In this session, search engine engineers and representatives share their most important takeaways and tips for those hoping to do better in traffic, plus there’s lots of time devoted to open Q&A.

[Comment From Michael Martinez]I'm curious about what they did for the Wordpress hack at the beginning of September.

1:50

Barry Schwartz: @michael, ill try to ask, but room is packed...

1:50

Barry Schwartz: He showed an example of fake anti-virus software which is really malware

1:51

Barry Schwartz: EDU Spam:

EDU sites are targeted by spammers because they are not often patched

He shows some examples...

1:51

Barry Schwartz: Forum/Blogs are spam fests

1:52

Barry Schwartz: If you don't take security seriously?- make users watch more porn- help them buy viagra- infect their computers with malware

but this all leads to you losing your reputation.

1:52

[Comment From Michael Martinez]And do they trust any forum/blog links any more? :)

1:53

Barry Schwartz: Good Practices:

Strong Passwords

Keep software up to date

Use malware and spyware detection tools often

Hide your sensitive files

Monitor your directories and forums

Keep tabs on your web site

1:54

FlightpathNY: Sasi Parthasarthy from Bing team believes website security should be a priority when selecting back Links for seo. They must be vetted #smx

1:54

Barry Schwartz: Cirs Pierry from Yahoo is also on the panel, but no preso...

1:55

Barry Schwartz: Q&A Time

1:55

[Comment From Pavlicko]I'd also recommend limiting the file types users can upload if you're using a cms

1:55

si1very: Sasi Parthasarathy @bing just presented securing Ur site or else "you’ll show your users porn when they don’t want to see it"! #SMX

2:01

Barry Schwartz: Question for Google: is it good to keep the rel-canonical tag for search engines to only rank english site... but use JavaScript to redirect users based on IP..

Issues:

(1) Google excuted JS more(2) You still won't rank for those pages, cause those other pages won't be in the index.

The panel is getting frustrated by the question...

2:02

Barry Schwartz: Google said JS redirects doesn't mean they don't treat it like a temp redirect

2:03

Barry Schwartz: FYI, Matt Cutts has a video...

2:04

2:05

Barry Schwartz: Google said... Images with alt text do get pass along as anchor text

2:06

[Comment From Michael Martinez]Images are passed with the anchor text?

2:06

Barry Schwartz: @michael the alt text in an image, is considered anchor text

2:07

[Comment From Michael Martinez]Okay, that I knew. I was just wondering if we were now going to have to debate ImageRank Sculpting.

2:07

Barry Schwartz: Bing said linking out does not help your rankings, it is not part of the algorithm... Interesting he said that.

2:09

Barry Schwartz: Google doesn't like "Soft" 404s, but they do not penalize by it

2:09

[Comment From Michael Martinez]Probably because more SEO bloggers are saying it does, perhaps because I have been telling people to create resources where the outbound anchor text is indexed as part of their onpage content. The message is getting shifted to "here is how to spam the search engines".

2:09

Barry Schwartz: Cris from Yahoo said they do use linking out as one of many signals for ranking.

2:11

Barry Schwartz: No search engines use meta keyword tag, even Yahoo. Yahoo dropped it a few months ago...

2:11

Barry Schwartz: Repeat: No search engines use meta keyword tag, even Yahoo. Yahoo dropped it a few months ago...

2:15

[Comment From Michael Martinez]Yahoo! was the one that screwed up the "soft 404" tactic. They kept indexing home pages under multiple URLs. Not advisable to use it any more for that reason alone.